Letter writers offer their ideas for executing Texas killers

The Associated Press

Published 6:07 pm, Saturday, September 5, 2015

Image 1of/1

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 1

Letter writers offer their ideas for executing Texas killers

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

AUSTIN— Gov. Greg Abbott has received more than 3,300 letters concerning the death penalty in Texas, including some from people who offered suggestions about alternate ways of killing prisoners like using heroin seized during drug busts as a low-cost execution drug.

Others have suggested using a firing squad or subjecting the condemned to carbon monoxide poisoning, and one writer morbidly suggested giving them a sedative and then draining the blood until they die.

The recommendations were in response to the difficulties that Texas and other death penalty states have had in obtaining the drugs used in lethal injections, The Dallas Morning News reported.

European pharmaceutical companies stopped providing some drugs because they object to capital punishment, which has been outlawed in every European country except Belarus. States now are relying largely on compounding pharmacies, which are mostly unregulated, to produce made-to-order execution drugs.

Texas executes inmates by administering a single lethal dose of pentobarbital, a barbiturate often used to euthanize animals. Some states started using it as the supply of other drugs dwindled.

Most of the letters Abbott has received since taking office in January plead for clemency for inmates facing execution.

Abbott also is repeatedly asked to end the death penalty in Texas.

The letters, some more polite than others, were obtained by the newspaper through an open-records request.

About a dozen stood out because they offered their ideas, some grotesque, for new ways to conduct executions.

One writer from Oregon said nitrogen could be used because it displaces oxygen in the body.

“For your concerns I believe it would be a much better way to execute murderers because the (sic) won’t know they are going out and they will be dead as soon as the nitrogen has displaced the oxygen in the body quite painlessly,” the man wrote.

Another writer offered to round up firing squads.

“I have read that the average lethal injection cost $50,000,” his letter explains. “I would be willing to provide a five-man squad for $20,000 saving the state of Texas $30,000 on every execution.”

Although the letters were addressed to Abbott, it’s the Legislature that decides how executions should be carried out. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1982, the law has required that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice use lethal injection. While the number and type of drugs has changed in recent years, the process has not.